We were a little bit blown away by the response we got to this Bay Area psychedelic space rock outfit's last record, the Canal Smarts lp, which we made our Record Of The Week on our last New Arrivals list. We couldn't keep it in stock, which is sort of the way we imagined it should be, especially considering considering that a portion of our review for that record was us lamenting the fact that these guys were not more well known, and didn't get the same sort of hype as other local psych-space combos like Carlton Melton and Wooden Shjips, not to mention groups like White Hills, Bardo Pond and the like. But for all the space-rocking 3 Leafs do, they seem to tend toward the blissed out, the meditative and abstract, for every stretch of propulsive krautrock like psychedelia, there's an even more sprawling segment of effects heavy drift, or looped jazzy mesmer, which bring us to Spaa, the soothing connotations no coincidence, as Spaa is in fact a single 45 minute jam, and one that spends most of its time in droned out raga mode, in fact, the band lock into a slow, haunting, darkly percussive groove from the onset, fading in gradually, as if this whole record was in fact cut from an even more epic and epically endless jam, the guitar buzz sitar-like, the bass woozy and elastic, thick and fluid, the drumming subtle and minimal, more a pulse really than a beat, and once the drums / bass / guitar are locked in place, the track unfurls hypnotically, while all around that central groove, all manner of sounds and textures shift and shimmer and swirl, cascades of glimmering glitchery, whooshing wind like whirs, disembodied vocals wrapped in echo and delay, the sound definitely reminding us of Aussie jazz minimalists The Necks, which is never a bad thing. Unlike most space jams, Spaa is not a slow build, peppered with explosive crescendos, instead, it lurks and meanders, creeps and slithers, shuffles and shimmers, the vibe mesmerizing, the groove utterly hypnotic, and while there is the occasional passage of wild FX or fluttery flute, as well as occasional strange tangles of melody, the only real sonic shift comes with a few minutes left, the sound becoming weirdly warped and woozy, almost new agey sounding, with thick swirls of hazy synth and chordal whir, that give the sound a sort of Goblin / Zombi vibe, finishing off with a wild squall of buzzing, blurred psychswirl chaos, before cutting out abruptly, as if someone just reached over and pushed stop on the recorder, leaving us to imagine the band playing on and on and on and on...
Brand new ep from this NY band, who as we mentioned in past reviews, were constantly being touted as 'the loudest band in New York', but as we also mentioned, that sort of thing rarely translates to record. Take NZ outfit Bailter Space, whose records ruled, and were definitely heavy, but didn't even begin to hint at that band's sheer power live, and their infamously ear destroying volume. These guys may very well be loud as fuck, but over the last few records, regardless of volume, they definitely seem to have been honing their songwriting chops, with each record sounding more and more focused and less an exercise in bash and pound, and more about wreathing their shoegazy jangle pop in plenty of blissed out shimmer and blurred space-y roooaaaar.
That said, the opening track here is MASSIVE, and DOES sound like maybe these guys could be the loudest band around, the bass thick and buzzy, the drums a reverby pound, the production spacious and epic, the vocals an echo drenched croon, drifting over the soaring guitar melodies, and churning rhythm, with the song exploding into some serious psychedelic sections, so blown out and in-the-red it totally sounds like it's doing damage to your speakers, or your eardrums, or both! The rest of the record dials back the crush a bit, getting a bit more moody and atmospheric, but that buzzing bass drives everything, whether it's the almost Interpol-ish sounding garage rock-y drift of "So Far Away", or the hazy washed out shuffle of the title track, or the frenetic new wave noise of "It'll Be Alright", which does match the intensity of the opener in places, until finally, the band wind down with the almost industrial sounding "Drill It Up", with it's muted guitar harmonics, THAT gorgeous noisy, buzzy bass, some galloping drum pound, more gauzy vox, all wound up into a killer blast of new wave shoegaze garage bliss.
We'd heard lots of whinging about this, the newest record from French electronica outfit Air, the main complaint being that they were just making Moon Safari all over again. We're not sure what those folks were listening to, cuz minus the group's seemingly everpresent lunar obsession, sonically, this sounds way less like the warm fuzzy style electronica they were so beloved for, and more like some tripped out psychedelic French prog. Although once we started listening to this new one, we went back and realized that they had actually always had a sort of seventies French prog vibe happening, it's just that here, that sound seems darker, and less fuzzy and bubbly than lots of past Air jams. Most likely that's cuz it's a soundtrack, a newly composed score for the legendary 1902 silent film Le Voyage Dans De Lune, which even if you haven't see the film, you're probably familiar with one of the film's most iconic images, the face in the moon, with the rocket ship in its eye (wondering if that man in the moon influenced the Mighty Boosh's moon man?!). Apparently there was a color version, which was believed lost, and only rediscovered in the early nineties, but in terrible condition, and it was only a year or two ago, that the newly restored, hand painted color version was finished, and wow, it looks AMAZING, as you'll see here cuz Air's soundtrack is accompanied by a bonus dvd featuring the newly restored film, complete with new score.
Anyway, the music, film or not, is gorgeous and woozy, dark and hauntingly romantic, with lots of tribal percussion, shimmering strings, angelic vocal harmonies, low slung grooves and a sort of downtempo funkiness here and there. The opener sets the tone, with it's big booming drums, loping rhythm, orchestral stabs, weirdly pitch shifted vocals, even some warped faux dialogue, swirling synths, it totally sounds like some tripped out track you might here on some Finders Keepers comp. The rest of the record is a gorgeous moody jumble of playful skitter, brooding drift, tinkling melodies, fluttering flutes, soaring strings, slo-mo funk, some parts that almost sound like the High Llamas, others, that have a dusky Earth like twang, others the could be some sort of Stereolab / BBC Radiophonic Workshop / Perrey & Kingsley mash up, the tracks laced with all manner of sound effects and shimmering synthscapes, but the psychedelic moody seventies progginess of that opening track seems to be the theme, the sound continually returning to that sort of dark groove. Every time we play this in the store someone comes up to see what it is, and then is surprised to find out it's Air. And again, the film, wow, would be worth it even sans the soundtrack, the new print is stunning, totally surreal and druggy and psychedelic, lovely and beautifully crafted, the colors only adding to the trippiness. But Air's trippy groovy soundtrack just seals the deal!
How we love this band!! And sure, the also recently reissued Icky Mettle from 1993 might be the record by this North Carolina indie rockers that most folks hold near and dear, but we say the follow up, 1995's Vee Vee is just as good. What it may sacrifice in punk-pop urgency (which is not all that much really), and balls out debut record go-for-broke-ness, it makes up for with more well crafted songs (some of their best for sure), all without diluting the band's frenetic energy, or the strange gnarled angular riffing that defined their sound and made them instantly recognizable.
Just give a listen to "Harnessed In Slums", which was the 'hit', easily as good as anything on Icky Mettle, the sound super elastic and melty, the core jangle warped onto something woozy and super rocking and in its own way sorta psychedelic. And the next track too, "Nevermind The Enemy", with its super catchy opening riff, and backing up truck beeps, explodes into another killer slab of jangle and crunch, with guitar melodies that sound like the band's playing with slides, all slippery and sonically prismatic. Everything driven by some kick ass drumming, and singer Eric Bachmann's killer raspy vox. It's sorta hard to explain beyond the above just what it is that makes these guys so special, and their sound so unique, and how they managed to fit in with all their North Carolina brethren, while sounding nothing like any of those other bands. But here we are 17 years on, and we have to fight the urge to slip into grumpy old rock guy mode and proclaim that they just don't make bands like this anymore, but hell, why fight it, cuz they really don't. Folks who missed out on these guys the first time around, and who were maybe weaned on a less idiosyncratic indie rock will be blown away, and realize that music can be catchy and hooky, and still be freaky and fucked up and totally original.
The reissue tacks on a whole disc of bonus tracks, including a handful of different mixes, some killer lo-fi 4-track demos, not to mention some even more lo-fi boombox demos. Plus some unreleased tracks, some rare B sides (which are amazing!) and maybe coolest of all, an unreleased cover of John Coltrane's Equinox, that the band make their own, to the point that the first time through, we just thought it was one of theirs!
Last list we reviewed a dvd from a 'group' called Author & Punisher, a one man industrial doom band, whose sole member, Tristan Shone, designed and fabricated an incredible array of massive sound generators: a 300 pound spinning metal disc, a huge hydraulic handled chain driven (and seriously physical) drum machine, a motorized handled bass generator, a headgear with a multi mic'd mask, to transform vocals into different sounds and rhythms... We were mesmerized by the footage, the sound was amazing, heavy and crushing, totally intense, but watching this guy, physically create and trigger the sounds, is what sealed the deal, an brutal and exhausting 'performance', a sweat soaked, instrumental work out, way more interesting than the legion of boring floorcore laptoppers and effects jockeys. That said, most of us tend to not re-watch videos, whereas records we'll spin over and over again. So we figured it would definitely be worthwhile to track down a proper record from A&P, and here it is.
The title says it all, Drone Machines, not to mention the front cover image of A&P maestro Shone, hunched over the huge spinning metal disc. So if you picked up the dvd, you know what sort of crushing sonic punishment you're in for, and if you missed out on that dvd completely somehow, then this is your chance to get introduced to A&P's churning, chugging, pummeling low end industrial doom crush.
Purely sonically, these sounds could have been played by a band, or created on a computer, but just realizing that it's one guy, and his army of sound generators, definitely adds something to the listening experience. Plus there's also plenty of weird sonic manipulation that could NOT be played by a band, thick bass tones slow down like someone pressing their finger down on a record while it's playing, that would be that massive disc, the booming percussion, involves a slamming of the huge chain driven hydraulic handle, hearing this, picturing that, makes it sound that much heavier, but screw it, taken on music alone, the sound of Drone Machines is classic post industrial metal crunch, but twisted and a little warped, a more robotic and machine-like Godflesh maybe, the tone and timbre definitely owes much to Broadrick's industrial beast. But then the record will offer up some weird buzzing almost synthy sounding bass, and weird high end tangles, strange haunting melodies swirling around, a totally tripped out psychedelic swirl, and we're in some far out sonic sci-fi universe, before it gives way to another stretch of lurching lumbering Teutonic pound. The vocals, when there are vocals, are gruff and howled, again harkening back to Broadrick, and add some serious menace to the already sonically menacing proceedings.
The best parts for us are the parts where the sound sources become obvious, or at least where you can tell something weird and special is going on, the swooping low end, constantly changing pitch, the various sounds becoming clipped or cut off, the grinding rumbling low end speeding up then slowing down, it makes the whole experience that much more warped and tripped out and psychedelic. The music becomes more than a chunk of industrial metal, it becomes a heaving metallic monster MADE from industrial metal, the various gears and servos emitting strange buzzes and whirrs, its thunderous footsteps the booming beat, the speaker rattling low end it's guttural growl, and the howling vox, the man that commands this beast, and instructs it to do his bidding, a futuristic steampunk, post industrial robotic doom metal dirge, that we just can't get enough of!
You know we must confess it is getting harder and harder to write about instrumental acoustic guitar records and not repeat ourselves. Sure we can talk about the various fingerpicking styles, the different tunings, the long-enduring influence and lasting legacy of John Fahey, but it starts to sound routine and in a wide field of players concentrating solely on one instrument, it's not easy to keep a fresh perspective. So thank the stars that the Tompkins Square label has reissued this amazing 1970 recording from Robbie Basho because it sounds so refreshing. Basho was the least known of the Takoma label trio, John Fahey and Leo Kottke being the brighter stars. But Basho's style heavily influenced by raga modalities and Celtic melodic structures was more akin to the classical and Eastern hybrid styles of Sandy Bull and Pete Walker. Venus in Cancer is a transitional recording originally released on ABC's Blue Thumb imprint just after he left the Takoma label and before his later New Age dabbling on Windham Hill. The songs are long and flowing, spiritually imbibed (but not overtly so) with melancholic melodic structures and raga-ish tempos that occasionally burst out in song. Yes, folks, Robbie Basho sings on this one (a point other reviews we read seem to ignore). But, before you all run away into the hills, let us tell you that his voice is a) pretty great in context with what he's playing and b) it's thankfully sparse throughout the record. On one song, he does some Henry Flynt-style field hollering, on another a bit of spoken verse, and yet on another his voice recalls a slowed down Antony or John Jacob Niles. This has got to be one of the best and unusual examples of primitive guitar we have heard in a while and as you well know we have heard a lot. Plus the cover art is pretty damn rad. Highly Recommended!
Yep that's Masaki Batoh, the visionary leader of Japanese modern day hippie psych legends Ghost, looking rather more futuristic than his usual shamanistic self, on the cover of Brain Pulse Music, his new solo album for Drag City. The elaborate science fictional headgear Batoh is wearing, a tangle of wires, electrodes, metal bands, and for some reason goggles, is the eponymous Brain Pulse Music machine he helped invent. Apparently in clinical trials for therapeutic medical use, it somehow helps to stabilize one's brain waves, by electronically transmitting them in the form of audio signals that can be controlled via a biofeedback procedure. So this high-tech augmentation of Batoh's traditional acupuncture practice has applications to his musical activities as well, as heard here on this disc dedicated to the victims of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and ensuing nuclear disaster. According to Batoh, the BPM machine can promote healing for both the user employing it, and hopefully more widely as a tool for literally higher-minded music making.
So, what's it sound like? High pitched electronic drone-tones, rising and falling, sometimes soothing, sometimes noisy, not unlike the "onkyo" music of fellow Japanese experimentalists such as the sine-wave artist Sachiko M, for instance. We'd assume that depending upon the brains involved (of both user and listener!), the sounds the BPM machine produces could be perceived as either blissful or possibly piercingly aggravating. But, Batoh includes a lot more than straight BPM recordings on this album. The machine's drones are (usually) mixed with more traditional, ethnic Japanese acoustic instrumentation, such as wood block percussion, drums, gongs, bells, and shakuhachi flute. While some tracks are all about the BPM whines, others foreground the simple ceremonial ancient sounds (indeed, a few omit the BPM machines entirely), with the disc's 10+ minute final cut utilizing two BPM machines at the same time, alongside plasma theremin, springer FX, and shinto chant. That one is particularly amazing, pulsations indeed, by the end sounding like at least one of the BPM machines must have been plugged into Merzbow's brain.
Interesting stuff conceptually of course, but also the BPM meshes well with Batoh's less high-tech, more timeless Ghost-like musical rituals.
Nice silver-and-black graphics and design, with personal liner notes from Batoh himself.
It wasn't so long ago, that UK heavies Bong were just an amusingly-named band that counted one of our customers as a member. It took a while, but eventually we got 'em to send us some records (you can imagine, a band named Bong isn't the most businesslike and efficient bunch, nice folks though they are). And their brand of stoned, psychedelic, Eastern-tinged doomdrone improv proved to be right up our alley, and appropriate to their moniker.
Now, a couple years later, we've sold many, many Bong lps, cds, and cd-rs - and one of us here even got to see 'em live, last year. That'd be Allan, when he went to the amazing Roadburn festival in Holland (sadly, he missed out on going again this year, darn it). Of course, being a fan, he was excited about seeing Bong in person. And even though they're not the sort of band to move around much on stage, they weren't boring. In fact, they were TERRIFIC. Allan was also told afterwards that their performance was recorded, and would be released on Roadburn's Burning World label. Beyond that, strangely enough, Allan doesn't remember much else specific about the show (there may have been a contact high involved from their music that affected his memory faculties) but now at long last here's Bong's Live At Roadburn 2010 release to remind him! And for the rest of us to enjoy as well, and not have to be so jealous that we didn't go to Roadburn too.
After some enthused hails from the crowd, the first of two loooooong tracks ("Onwards To Perdonaris", 33:24) starts up, or seeps in, eerie and airy and understated, quite lovely really, not at all heavy, but nicely hypnotic...until a few minutes in when one may be rudely startled (depending on how high you have your volume set) by some deep voiced declamations, dunno what the fellow is on about, but that's ok, 'cause it serves to alert you that right about NOW the band is really gonna get LOUD, everything stepping up a big notch, to accommodate a constant drone backing, yeah now it's heavy, but still keeping the hypnotic lovely thing going too, slow rhythmic pulsations punctuated by an exotic zing of the strings (that's the "Shahi Baaja", an electrified Indian zither / drone harp with typewriter keys that one of the Bong-sters plays), once in a while joined again by more near-throat singing... It's rolling, rumbling, atmospheric, Eastern, with something of the quality of a cult ceremony or religious rite, in part due to the those occasional low monkish vocals. At times, "Onwards..." drifts back down into lulling stretches of spacey warbling electronic FX, and hippy-kraut hand drumming, coming across like a sinister Siloah or doomy Amon Duul. Or imagine the Master Musicians Of Bukkake making an ambient album for Miasmah, maybe.
The equally epic second track, "Wizards Of Krull" (previously recorded for the first side of their self-titled lp debut in 2009), continues in this vein, with more powerful percussion, though. It's 24 minutes of ritualistically pounding drums and crashing cymbals, low drone from bass and voice both, gobs of distortion and spooky psychedelic effects, those Shahi Baaja note clusters chiming in with regularity. "Wizards..." gets (slowly) more and more intense as it goes, really ramping up towards the end with rhythmic urgency. Damn this is good!
Bong bring it, all right, quite recommended, definitely for fans of Om, SUNNO))), Grails, Sylvester Anfang... and of course Bong. And bongs! Most if not all Bong releases thus far have been live, and this one is much less of a lo-fi recording than some of those, making for an essential document of Bong's unique trance-inducing potency.
Leyland Kirby has been on a real roll lately! Not only recently releasing two of our favorite albums from last year, Eager To Tear Apart The Stars and The Caretaker's An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, but also three installments of synth and sound experiments in his Intrigue and Stuff series. And now we have this beautiful and elegiac new Caretaker recording which is a soundtrack to a new documentary by Grant Gee on the German writer, WG Sebald and the influence of his most renowned book Rings of Saturn. It's an apt fit as both Kirby and Sebald have both been concerned with themes of memory, time, loss and decay (both individually and historically) and the attempts to reconcile with them in both literary and musical terms. We got a limited amount of the now out of print vinyl of this a couple weeks ago, not nearly enough to list, and those are surely gone now, but at least now here's the cd version!
Sebald's book mixed history, travelogue, fiction and memoir into a meditative account of the personal and public histories of Suffolk. The essayistic documentary takes a similarly multi-layered and nonlinear tact by tracking the same locations and landscapes, which is greatly aided by Kirby's score, which instead of using the prewar ballroom music of his last two Caretaker albums, sources a 78 rpm recording of a song cycle by Franz Schubert from 1828 called Winterreise. One of Schubert's last compositions before his death, Winterreisse was based on the poems of Wilhelm Muller, a soldier intrigued by the miraculous and grim cycles of nature, and stands as one of Schubert's most melancholic and dark compositions. In his notes for the song cycle, Schubert describes the setting: "Early on the wanderer sings about his lost beloved. As the song cycle develops he sings of abject loneliness, longing for death, and glimpses of delusional hope." Certainly sounds about right for a Caretaker album.
In true Caretaker fashion, Kirby sources snippets of melodic piano loops and wreathes them in a sheen of murky hiss, and weaves them into repetitive sonic layers. Sometimes a snippet of vocal can be detected before being cut off when the loop restarts putting the piece in a constant flux of promise and denial. The distant resonance of romantically wistful piano reverberations culminate in a seemingly rapturous fog of rained out daydreams. While Winterreise is largely a vocal cycle, Schubert saves most of the emotional heft of the composition for the piano, using it as the voice of the poet moreso than the vocal elements. Kirby fashions his composition much the same way, filtering or burying the vocal elements until the final track, where the ghostly chorus of voices slightly slowed, comes out in full force for a deeply moving climax.
This is a gorgeous score that is beautiful on its own even removed from its source or ignorant of its inspiration, but it has also made us equally excited to see the documentary, read the book, listen to the original Schubert piece as well as read the poems that inspired them. Enthralling!
Finally a good Cocteau Twins collection on vinyl! There has been plenty of anthologies and collections of this ethereal dream pop trio coming out since the band's 1996 break-up. We suspect that is partly to satisfy fans by collecting all the odds and ends the band recorded (they have 4 cds worth of singles and B sides alone), but perhaps also to get more fan influence to pressure the band to finally release their scrapped and abandoned last album. Here's hoping!
Stars and Topsoil is a vinyl reissue of an 18 song compilation originally released on cd in 2000 of the band's picks from their essential 4AD catalog, from Garlands to Heaven Or Las Vegas, including rare ep and single tracks. Diehard fans who already own the records will no doubt have this stuff already, but for new fans or the newly curious, this is as good as a place to start as any. You can hear so many recent artists (Beach House, Gang Gang Dance, Ulrich Schnauss, M83, Sleep Over, Grouper, Puro Instinct, to name but a few) in the gauzy DNA strains of this seminal group.
This legendary / infamous slab of punk rock, finally reissued on vinyl!!
Formed in early 1977, The Consumers were Phoenix Arizona's answer to the Germs. Punk fucking rock. After recording their debut album (20 minutes of adrenaline fueled, hateful, spazzy and totally catchy punk) shortly after their inception, the Consumers relocated to LA where they continued to terrorize, destroy and get banned from playing almost anywhere! Furious and angry and kick ass and better than almost any punk rock since ('cept maybe the Electric Eels, who they definitely have a thing or two in common with, sonically and otherwise). Two of the Consumers went on to play in 45 Grave, Human Hands and Dream Syndicate, while the other two Consumers went on to...die! Only two Consumers are still alive!! Punk as fuck.
With only a single cassette release to her name, Mira Cook has already become one of our favorite delicate, hypnotic and entrancing music makers of the last few years. We've been lucky to get to see her play around town so much, each time watching as she adds a new self taught instrument to the mix, as she creates songs that are really like these miniature fairy tales of the everyday. Her cassette only release, was one of our best selling tapes of 2009, and for good reason. It introduced us to her unique, inviting and warm sensual world of sound. Signs contains some reworked versions of songs that appeared on the cassette along with a bunch of brand new tracks. Using loops as a way to create endless entrancing melody, and taking so sweetly to everything from dulcimer, to drum machines, to piano, to organ, etc., it's Mira's assured and captivating voice that transports us so utterly and completely. It's hard not to think about people like Joanna Newsom, Juana Molina and Bjork, as there is that same kind of unique vision, charm and golden presence in Cook's songs. We're also reminded a lot of that a capella record that Petra Haden made covering The Who's Sell Out. Like the musical equivalent of a Joseph Cornell box, every song on Signs is filled with such unique treasures!
The latest chunk of strange sonic sweetness from aQ beloved cd-r label Debacle, comes from Seattle one man band Crystal Hell Pool (first recommended to us by aQ pal Hank), whose Domain is a fantastic slab of zoned out psychedelic new age, retro electronic industrialism, that reminds us of Giorgio Moroder or Zombi one second, and then Skinny Puppy the next, with pulsing electronic grooves, rumbling buzzing bass drones, swirling atmospheric synths, ominous atmospheres and hazy washed out melodies. Every track here is darkly cinematic and hauntingly atmospheric, with opener "Zentrum" lulling us in with some sun dappled celestial synth shimmer, before "Life In Silence" drags us down into some strange horror movie swirl of creeping, rhythmic lurch, and thick synthy thrum, dizzying and deliriously nightmarish, the perfect soundtrack for some strange convoluted chase through crawl spaces in a lost seventies giallo. And then BAM! It's right back to more pulsing eighties style retro-futuristic grooviness, but even those groovier moments are still infused with a looming dread, the sound shifting from blurred shimmer, to caustic corrosive crunch, but always sinister, and grimly groovy, that Skinny Puppy vibe, a sort of claustrophobic tension and soul stirring unease, seems to grow more intense as the record progresses, culminating in the churning murky closer, "Melting Face, Melting Hands", which is fantastically moody and eerie, and ends far too soon...
We've long been fans of the mysterious Death Cheetah, aka local visual artist / musician Kevin Taylor, we've carried a super limited cd-r and a compilation tape, both long out of print, he also did the artwork for the AmocomA cd on Andee's tUMULt label, but beyond that we've heard little from Taylor lately. Until this showed up one day, a super striking screen printed black and white envelope, inside of which was a thick, SQUARE lathe cut record, apparently carved directly into sheets of plexiglass. The sleeve is adorned with artwork by local artist Andrew Schoultz, and the pressing is limited to just FIFTY copies.
None of the DC's past releases really prepared us for this new jam, which finds DC laying down some sort of twisted electro-black-metal, churning blackened riffage, furious drumming, but the whole thing underpinned by a blooping synth, that while reminiscent of Burzum, here transforms the song into something else entirely, especially when the guitars fade out, leaving just the blooping melody and the blasting drums, and occasionally the guitars get all blown out and stonery adding some weird almost Kyuss-y melody to the mix, but for the most part the sound shifts back and forth between the churning synth flecked buzz, and more dense drum heavy blackness. And then there's the vocals, super effected, a raspy demonic howl, draped over an almost Queens Of The Stoneage guitar melody, all the while the synth percolates in the background.
And since it's a lathe cut, the sound is transformed as well, the built in static and hiss, the extreme surface noise, makes this sound somehow like it's some rare early nineties Norwegian demo tape from the freakiest fucked up long defunct black metal horde you've never heard of, and beyond that, it fundamentally changes the sound, woozy and warped and warbly, which only adds to its genius. It's hard to explain how great and weird and cool this is, other than to tell you we've listened to it maybe 20 times JUST TODAY. And we don't see that changing anytime soon.
And as mentioned above, it's LIMITED TO JUST 50 COPIES, each one hand numbered, in hand screened sleeves, we have 15 copies, but those might not last long...
Taking inspiration from the mysteries and might of the San Francisco Bay, this collaborative effort is authored by two hitherto unknown ambient engineers. With its deep channels and strong currents, the San Francisco Bay is a principal part of the oceanographic and meteorological mechanics that give rise to the region's temperate summers and mild winters. For the most part, the weather patterns are very consistent and become invisible even to those of us who have lived here for decades. But, when those ocean and air currents push the fog bank through the Golden Gate Bridge and around the islands in the Bay, the visual impact (not to mention the physical drop in temperature) can generate responses of awe, transcendence, fear - or just the common lamentation that you forgot to bring an extra layer of clothing....
IA (aka Alex Copeland) resided in Oakland for some time, but Julien Demoulin is a Belgian artist and may have personally experienced the San Francisco Bay in his travels. The collaborative meditation on the San Francisco Bay takes the form of extended drone and dark ambient passages, which easily present themselves as sonic equivalents to the dramatic convergences of land, air, and sea. Thrumming harmonics collapse into lapping washes of soft noise, abstracted field recordings ground brightened arcs of ghostly melodies which shimmer like the flecks of sunlight that rake across the fog bank in the twilight hours, and the numerous drones take up shadowy isolationist strategies. After some 35 minutes of tone color shifting from black to grey to blue with a dreamtime pacing, Demoulin and Copeland snap into a lovely coda, which begins with a strum across an autoharp and leads into an interlude for melancholy flutes swimming in thick reverb. It's a lovely way to end the record, with all of its comparisons to Biosphere, Thomas Koner, and the Mystery Sea label.
We seem to dig Disappears more and more with each release. Pre Language finds them ripping it up so mean and lean from start to finish. With an in your face post-punk conviction that makes us think of A Frames covering Television's Marquee Moon. On the one hand their sound is bare bones and no frills dark tinted rocknroll, but on the other, there seems to be a complexity and impactfulness to all these songs. With a similar aesthetic to The Wipers, the straightforward full-on rocking of SST era Sonic Youth (SY's Steve Shelley is now the drummer for Disappears), or the most recent outings by Shellac. This is a reminder that sometimes the things that actually sound the most mean and menacing are the ones that don't try so hard to put on an act, but instead just kick out bombastic songs with full on conviction. Something really refreshing these days about a band who channel their intensity with full on punk spirit, for focused and furious sounding results. Awesome!
It's remarkable when a band is so influential, they essentially create a new genre, and in the process, inspire a legion of sound alikes and wanna-be's, but for a band to do that TWICE in their career, and each time with a distinctly and dramatically different sound, that's practically unheard of. But that's exactly what happened with slow Seattle heavies Earth, who these days are more slow than heavy, but back in the day, they pretty much invented the slo-mo tarpit sludge that so many bands continue to ape to this day, probably most notably, SUNNO))), who even began life as an Earth tribute band. But as has been well documented here, after Earth disappeared for a while, they suddenly resurfaced with a whole new sound, a sort of dusky twang, a deserty slowcore, that seems to have once again created its own cult of sonic supplicants. Few of which can hold a candle to the originals.
This is essentially, as the title would suggest, the second part of the band's Angels Of Darkness, Demons Of Light duology, so really most of what we wrote about the first part applies here too, and needless to say, if you got the first one, you're gonna want this one too, and it does take up right where the first one left off, after a brief bit of abstract strum and drift, the sound really takes shape on "His Teeth Did Brightly Shine", a lazy, drawled bit of Southern slowcore dirgery, all interwoven guitars, and sun dappled shimmer, no drums to speak of yet, just clouds of cymbal sizzle and the occasional minimal percussion, otherwise, it's a super hypnotic sprawl of looped desertdrone mesmer. It's not til track three "A Multiplicity Of Doors", that the sound becomes rhythmic, with super minimal drumming, over moaning cellos and Morricone-esque twang, there is a bit of slow build, but not to an explosive crescendo, it's more like the sound intensifies and grows more lush and full bodied, propulsive, but only just, laid back, dreamy and druggy, the sound of a warm summery afternoon, or the soundtrack to a wander though rolling windswept desert hills, which is pretty much how the rest of the record plays out, only closer "The Rakehell" cranks up the momentum, but again, just a little, with the guitars more buzzy, and the sound a bit more darkly intense, but still ultimately just meandering through Earth's dusty sonic wasteland, with no particular place to go, and in no particular hurry to get there. Lovely as always.
One of SIX new Flaming Lips lps in the recently launched vinyl reissue program for everyone's favorite psychedelic weirdos turned mainstream indie rock heroes, 2002's Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, was the record that followed the group's massive breakthrough album, 1999's The Soft Bulletin. Yoshimi found the band returning with yet another gem which saw the band maturing, but seemingly only getting better with age. We used to think that about Tom Waits, Stereolab, and (some here think) Radiohead, but all those folks eventually released mediocre (perhaps bad?) records, whereas The Flaming Lips' career-long consistency through at the time 12 albums was pretty remarkable. Certainly many of their indie rock, pre-Warner fans abandoned the group well before this record, having soured on their current efforts, and probably just as many folks who discovered them via their hit "She Don't Use Jelly" (or possibly "Waitin' For A Superman") probably couldn't find much to enjoy in their early drug addled, psychedelic bombast. But with such a continually evolving yet uncompromising sound, they're bound to alienate some. There's a striking resemblance on Yoshimi to the recent works of Radiohead, but then again there's definitely much that parallels the Lips' career with that of our faves from across the Atlantic. Like Radiohead, The Flaming Lips have chosen ever more increasing studio experimentation, combining electronic music elements with lush arrangements and cohesive album-oriented productions. But more significant perhaps is that Yoshimi, a semi-concept album, shares a similar paranoid and alienated angst that Radiohead has been honing these last several albums. But where as Radiohead takes a decidedly maudlin, Orwellian approach in their song writing, the Flaming Lips work in an absurdist, comedic fashion more akin to Philip K. Dick. "One More Robot / Sympathy 3000-21" could have been cut straight out of a P.K.D. story: "Unit three thousand twenty one is warming / makes a humming sound - when its circuits duplicate emotions - and a sense of coldness detaches as it tries to comfort your sadness..." All this arranged about as close to a Sade song as Coyne and the Lips can conceivably get (which we also see as a friendly jab at the sterile audiophile machinations of modern "soul".) The humanization of machines vs. humanity stripped of love and hate is the theme that's mulled over throughout. Most of the songs on the album are in direct reference to a painful breakup (either real or concocted) and the fictional battle between Yoshimi and the Pink Robots is more of a parable for struggling in the aftermath of having one's heart dashed to pieces. The two themes are intertwined on the album, but loosely enough so that you aren't forced into a Pink Floyd Wall of a concept album. While not as completely rife with hits as The Soft Bulletin, there's a lot to be warmed up to with Yoshimi. At first listen it seemed as though the Lips and Mercury Rev-ifier Dave Fridman had produced nothing but 45 minutes of studio wizardry and ear candy, but continual listens finds these songs opening up like a veritable flower blossom. "In the Morning of the Magicians" with its recurring, heart rending instrumental bridge will even bring a tear to the most desiccated of eyes. And "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" (Part 1, *not* part 2) will have you singing along in your best cracked falsetto soon enough. We imagine the bean counters at AOL/Time Warner had a hard time listening to this more than once, if at all, as they neglected to print up enough copies for the first run, and we're not sure of the significance or if the title and her appearance on this record are mere coincidences or -gasp- something more, but AQ fave/crushworthy drummer/vocalist Yoshimi of the mighty Boredoms was a musical guest!!
The fifth in Fucked Up's ongoing series of Chinese Zodiac themed singles, this one obviously the Year Of The Tiger, and finds these punk rockers moving even further away from their punk rock roots, the only real punk thing about them is the members's handles, and vocalist Pink Eyes' howled bellow, otherwise the music continues to get more and more melodic, still heavy sure, but more sort of epic and jangly, this the A side of this one even has piano on it (courtesy of Austra) as well as guest vocals from director Jim Jarmusch (!) and someone called Annie-Claude Deschenes, and it's a good one, big bombastic, stadium indie rock, with soaring choruses, big jangly guitars, crunchy riffs, pounding drumming, and those vocals. The real surprise is the B side, which at 22 minutes long is apparently merely an excerpt of an even longer piece, and is a tripped out sidelong sprawl of experimental psychedelic Fucked Up-ness, starting with a symphony of backwards swoops, and blossoming into a blurred druggy wall of sound, that sounds a bit like multiple Fucked Up songs playing simultaneously, dizzying and carnivalesque in places, noisy and chaotic in others, the whole thing rife with cool backwards effects, which gives it a definite Teenage Filmstars vibe, and makes this out favorite Fucked Up jam in a while!
Includes a printed lyric sheet / insert and apparently, in the spirit of the theme, $1 from the sale of each record will go to the Save Tigers Now Foundation too.
Oh, we love art made from glitches, errors, surface noise, smudges, corrosives, and just plain mistakes. Just look at how we've championed Caretaker, Phillip Jeck, William Basinksi, and Oval, and how many times we applaud something for sounding antiquated, garbbled, warbling, or just utterly fucked-up. Which brings us to New York based sound artist Richard Garet and his atypical electronic systems involving lo-tech circuits, radio transmitters, and dismembered speaker cones, we seem to have found yet another artist whose beautiful demolition deserves our attention.
Back in 2011, Garet presented an audio-visual live piece at SFMOMA, which involved a wildly stroboscopic, flickering projection that triggered jittery noises from his table top of toy walkie-talkies and bits of circuitry. With the potential for gnarled interference and ugly distortion that the cross-currents and bare wires might impart, Garet's performance was somehow instead jaw-droppingly elegant, drawing a taut line from minimalist drone & crackle through John Duncan's psychoacoustics and back to David Tudor's Rainforest excursions, but shifted just slightly towards a hauntological mesmerism with ghosts of melody seemingly buried within. Areal works in the same way as that piece; and dates back to a different installation Garet presented at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, where he flooded the space with fog and shot color-field projections into the space swirling together with the eeriely divine drones. The music on the disc in all likelihood is a distillation of the Issue Project Room extravaganza, heightening the drama and intensity of the sounds without having the benefit of a fog and light show. Garet cites radio as a source material for Areal, but damn if he doesn't get the device to sound like a Rhys Chatham guitar symphony, a field of chromatic density and shivering heaviness blossoming from supple tones and crunched noises. The album's lush atmospherics wax and wane with variable degrees of intensity, with ethereal drifts collapsing into scrabbled texture later to be engulfed in a harmonic cauldron of buzzing thrum. Garet reveals his hand at the end of the 50-minute composition with some unkempt radio interference that snaps to a sudden conclusion. You may hear bits of Tim Hecker and bits of Phill Niblock in Garet's work. Everything Garet has done up until this album has been very good; but with Areal, he's taken it to another level. Absolutely required dronemuzik listening!
The Omni Recording Corporation has been killing it lately in a string of essential vinyl reissue collaborations with the Australian Roundtable label, focusing on rare library, lounge and private press exotica. We recently listed the Orchestra Peter Thomas Orion 2000 lp of tripped out sci-fi grooves, and this week we have two extremely fine examples of Italian library music from composer Egisto Macchi and his more well known group that included Ennio Morricone, Gruppo D'Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza.
While we have always respected and revered this Italian improv collective, much of their recorded output has been on the difficult listening side of things. Skronky free jazz , metallic bangs and tings, tape noise and pounding prepared piano. Sometimes abstract, dissonant and sparse, though equally majestic, heavy and remarkable, it hasn't always been easy to get behind...until now! Finally, a lost recording from 1971 for the Gemelli Library that was never released, Niente is a mind-scorching set of avant-psych groove. While there are still qualities of their defining sound present, this set is marked most notably by a strong rhythm section that is not afraid to jam out. Reminding us of favorite records from Faust and Can, this is the GDNC at their most kraut. Both funky and proggy, we think that moden day-psych fans of bands like Wooden Shjips, 3 Leafs, Carlton Melton and The Heads should look into the weird sound world of this release and get their minds blown!
Limited to 500 copies and nearly out of print, we were lucky to get the copies we have, so don't snooze on this one!
We first discovered this local black metal horde via a visit to radio station KFJC, who always invite aQ to be part of their annual 'Christless Eve', where the night of December 24th, they play the darkest, heaviest, sickest, weirdest black metal / noise / experimental music, with the aim of casting a black shadow over the cloying holiday cheer. This most recent year, heading home around 3am Christmas morning, after having been listening to crazy heaviness and warped black buzz for hours, we left with just one thing on our minds (well, two, if you count getting home and going to sleep), which was a newfound obsession with some band called Hagor. Whose single track that was played that night, lodged itself in our brain, and infected us with its whathefuck genius. It took some doing, but we finally got in touch with the band, and they brought some copies by of their cd-r, and holy shit, this stuff is so twisted and fractured and fucked, obviously influenced by classic blackness, but somehow on the way from listening to the classics, to making their own, the DNA got all tangled up, and the resulting sounds are some of the coolest weirdest black metal we've heard in ages, with much of this being so twisted up it's barely black metal at all. In fact, the opening track, "Accursed", is at the outset, a galloping rhythm, and a clean guitar riff, we were prepared for it to explode into some buzzing blackness, but then those elements just seem to lock into a dizzying loop, the guitar getting occasionally more distorted, but for the most part, it's a strange sort of hypnotic rhythmic psychedelic jam that reminds us a bit of 'wooden metal' weirdos Varghkoghargasmal. The second track is most definitely black metal, but it's SOOOOO lo-fi, it doesn't just sound like a rehearsal tape, it sounds like it was recorded on a lapel mic, super tinny, mostly just drums and vocals, but in its twisted minimalism, it becomes something else entirely, especially the burst of cymbal skree that sounds more like blasts of white noise. "Blitz-Krieg" is about as close as these guys get to traditional blackness, a loping midtempo blackbuzz blowout, that's blurred and smeared into a sort of greyed out drone, again those weirdly recorded drums give it a super twisted experimental vibe, even here when it's essentially super primitive raw blackness. And it doesn't get any less twisted as the record progresses, the strange soaring rhythmic synth prog of "Life In Death", or the crazy ULTRA lo-fi black pound of "Window Of Transparency", the warm, buzz drenched, woozy dirge of "Vigorous Forests"(great title!) or the -second- "Window Of Transparency", which manages to take the first one, and make it even more bizarre, the cosmic synthiness of "The Shift Of The Galaxy", or the droned out brittle buzz of "Spectrum", with some of the sickest vokills ever, the blown out, lush crumbling dirge of "Argus", replete with a sort of Burzum-y synth melody, over a dense black churn, to the record closer, which takes grim blackness and weds it to sort of primitive cold wave, minimal, tripped out, distorted and fucking bafflingly brilliant.
Absolutely essential listening for folks into twisted lo-fi blackness and warped outsider whathefuck buzz...
LIMITED TO ONLY THIRTY COPIES!!! We have almost half of the pressing, but needless to say, if you want one, best grab one quick...
My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be. What an awesome title. And the record cover, a bull and a rooster and an ornate candle, the words Harvey Milk in tiny blue type over the rooster. On the cd, the text: "Harvey Milk is Cronos, Mantis, Abadon". Song titles like�"Where The Bee Sucks, There Suck I",�"The Anvil Will Fall" and "Merlin Is Magic". By now most avid AQ customers are very familiar with the mysterious sludge rock power trio Harvey Milk, but when we first laid hands on this disc, back in 1994, we had no idea what to think. As if�the artwork wasn't enough to have us scratching our heads, the music inside was even more willfully difficult. And still is. Obviously borne of some serious Melvins worship, Harvey Milk, took the already difficult sound of the Melvins to new heights, or depths, crafting lengthy sludge jams, packed with as much space as riffs, long expanses of spastic John Bonham like drumming, vocals a whiskey soaked gravelly bellow, guitars thick black sheets. This was without a doubt some of the strangest music we had ever heard. But at the same time, somehow the most beautiful. The sound�of Harvey Milk was some impossible blend of noise rock, math rock, post rock, punk rock, twentieth century composition and METAL. All tangled into one huge gnarled black hole of sound. A sound that crawls more than it rocks, but when it does rock, it blows away pretty much any other band in the land.�
Lots of you no doubt already own Courtesy And Goodwill Toward Men, arguably one of the greatest records EVER, heavy, sludgy or otherwise. If you don't you need to stop reading for a second and go buy it right now. We'll wait...........
Okay, Courtesy was HM record number two, and found the band 'tightening' up their sound, taking the chaos of My Love, and crafting it into, well, more chaos. It's hard to say how they changed between these two records. My Love is a tiny bit faster. The best way to describe it is like this:�My Love is to Courtesy, the way Nirvana's Bleach is to Nevermind, more immediate and raw, but with some of the best songs the band ever wrote, and like Bleach, it's a record that tons of fans continue to insist is the best thing they've ever done. And while we are of the mind that Courtesy is in fact the best Harvey Milk record ever (unless you ask Allan, who would probably say The Pleaser, the -other- HM reissue this week, a killer disc of Harvey Milked ZZ Top worship) returning to My Love has us maybe reconsidering. We can't actually decide. There are so many amazing songs on My Love that we had forgotten about, as good as anything on Courtesy. It would probably be more realistic to proclaim�My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be /�Courtesy And Goodwill Toward Men as the ultimate math-sludge-slow-motion-dirge-doom-whatever one-two punch EVER. Maybe the greatest first and second record combo of all time. Needless to say, if you're at all into the current crop of slow motion doom mongers, and have somehow missed out on these records, you will lose your fucking mind (and odds are loads of you have never heard My Love as it's been out of print for ages). It's no exaggeration when we say every song on My Love is darn near perfect. But a few of our favorites:
"A Small Turn Of Human Kindness" was the absolute first peep we ever heard out of HM, and it's brutal and beautiful, so utterly confusing and unlike anything ever. A�frustratingly obtuse abstract jam, even calling it a jam is stretching the definition of the word jam, there's LOTS of space, the track begins with a minute of weird electronic noodling, a huge wash of cymbals and guitar scrape, a killer BIG drum fill, and then... nothing... a weird barely there buzz, some cymbal dings, a moaning cello.... How amazing is that?!?!? It isn't until halfway through the song before the riff finally kicks in, and even then, it's like pulling teeth to get these guys to let loose and rock. In fact, it's not until the last two minutes that the band really go for it. And it was worth the wait, but before you know it comes�"Women Dig it", slowing everything waaaaaaaaay back down. A super drawn out exercise in tension and release, with long stretches of just drums, big Zeppelin style drums, accompanied by mewled vocal, but which features one of the most awesome riffs EVER, so much so, that when it kicks in, it makes you want to rock the fuck out, which you could do if it wasn't just played once every couple minutes.... oh the glorious frustration!!! It's the sort of riff most bands would not only kill for, but that most bands would repeat over and over and over and base a whole song� around, whereas the Milk kick out that riff maybe twenty times, in the whole song, and all clumped together, with the rest of the song spent plodding and drifting and doing anything but locking into a killer groove. But that's what makes Harvey Milk so great, when that riff DOES drop, it's a ridiculous release, like an orgasm, this unbelievable rock-out relief, but like with most things it's the wait, the build up, that is the best part. Or at least the 'other' best part.
Another classic Milk track is�"The Anvil Will Fall", a moody drifting whispery ballad, peppered by huge bursts of downtuned pummel,�when out of nowhere, in come the strings, some patriotic hymn, an almost recognizable tune that Creston sings along too in his warbly raspy croon, even kicking it up into a wicked falsetto, before petering back out into the original hushed crawl, eventually launching into a super moving moody goddamned ANTHEM. The sort of song that should have sludge fans teary eyed with hat in hand, and hand over heart. And finally...
"Where The Bee Sucks, There Suck I", besides being the best song title maybe EVER, it's also one of the greatest songs ever, a really really�fucking weird song, howled tortured vocals over a relentless tribal drum fill with occasional bursts of Zeppelin like riffage,�before the guitar transforms into a static rumbling drone, and the drums just sort of do whatever the hell they want, for ever it feels like...�and then the band launches back into it and it's some relentless bastardized groovy Southern sludge jam, but like all HM songs, they stop not long after to just sort of wander, and plod and wait, and pause, before doing it all over again....
We could go one and on, and get all mushy and fanboy about every single song on�My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be, but you get the drift. This record is magical. Majestic. Freaked out. Furious. Heavy as anything you've ever heard. Strangely pretty. Mind meltingly difficult. Crushing. Confusing. Baffling. Brutal. And pretty much one of our favorite records ever...
Got a few more copies of this final Harvey Milk album from '97. It's very different from their tUMULt release (the cd reissue of the '95 "Goodwill And Courtesy..." LP) which was super-heavy dronemetal to outdo the Melvins, but "The Pleaser" is still a great
Just because Jim is an AQ employee doesn't mean we can't gush like crazy about his new record. C'mon, pretty much everyone who works here plays in a band or runs a label. We like to think that the music we all make and release would be just the kind of stuff we love to listen to and sell, and just the kind of stuff you all like to listen to and buy. And such is the case with Jim's new record Telegraphy By The Sea, an album he's been working on for several years now, cobbled together from material culled from various elements used in installations and performances in New York, Australia and various locations in between.
The disc is lovely, all wrapped in an ominously blackened but totally beautiful package of silkscreen and letterpress that could at first glance be mistaken for another Jesu or Godflesh album with its telephone poles smeared into moire patterns.
The music inside is just as lovely. Rust, drones, shortwave, drones, acid rain, drones, a big pile of rocks, drones, a small pile of rocks, and more drones. Drones and drones. But like all of those great drone artists we freak out about (Chalk, Coleclough, Basinski, Organum, blah blah blah...), Jim's not one to let the drone settle as a terminal pool of inactivity. This is a dynamic album, bristling with texture amidst the shifting passages, dramatic shifts, and evocative soundscapes. The visual side of his installations has this weird eeriness as he builds dense layers of rust and debris on top of corroded photographs of abandoned buildings and desolate landscapes. Those same metaphors of abandoned, desolate spaces are musically represented in Telegraphy By The Sea. In these spaces, time is accelerated with things rusting, falling apart, getting covered in moss, and being washed away by the ocean. Scrapes and gurgles from all of those bits of metal, bricks, and rocks dissolve through radioactive sinewaves into a gorgeous magnetic wall of grey-slab tones, gradually building through half-melodic phrases, a clatter of monochrome, and squalls of crackling static. All of this snaps in an instant at the end of the album, giving way to a wondrous nocturnal ambience cobbled from luminous bell-tones and detuned shortwave radio communications.
One of Jim's good friends and collaborators Loren Chasse, said it better than we could, "A telephone cord in the sand? A message taken down using an alphabet of sea-glass, shell and carapace? It all makes sense in the last 11 minutes!"
This record just showed up in the mail one day, and before we even listened to it, we were totally blown away, a black lp, hand stained, with an upside down cross made out of branches attached to the front, with a sticker bearing a very black metal looking logo, that simply said Atwater. We were obviously expecting some super grim, cult black metal, but instead were treated to some gorgeous blackened dronefolk, haunting and hushed, mysterious and quite lovely. After a brief intro of dense billowing drones, beneath field recordings of a train, and the occasional birdcall, the sound shifts to a dark, droney, drifty, super minimal folk, simple melodies plucked out on a guitar, over a subtle swirl of creaks and groans, of moaning strings and streaks of feedback, not to mention subtle bits of percussion, a dark, brooding, haunting loveliness that is black metal only in spirit, the sound reminding us more of Earth, Barn Owl, Ulaan Khol, Godspeed and the like, the recording super intimate and intense, every sound in the room picked up by the mix, feet shuffling, fingers sliding on frets, the buzz of the snare drum, but it all is perfectly woven into Atwater's mournful dreamlike isolationist Appalachia, the subtle strum, and spare fingerpicking, occasionally wreathed in tendrils of distorted electric guitar, the sound shifting dreamily from twang flecked slowcore, to glacial bluegrass shimmer, from spare skeletal ghostfolk to washed out droneguitar thrum, the guitar is the focal point throughout, spending much of the record hovering in black expanses and unfurling dark skeletal melodies, but the recording, the ambience, all play a huge part, as do the strings, the very occasional drumming, there's even saxophone at one point, everything woven into an ominously gorgeous songsuite of ghostly mesmer and dolorous drift.
LIMITED TO 148 COPIES!!! Each one hand stained, numbered and silkscreened, with an upside down cross made from branches affixed to the front, includes a thick printed cardstock insert, with a color photo on one side, liner notes on the other. Also includes a download coupon. WARNING: these are very fragile, and there's a good chance that the branches/cross may come loose during shipping, if that happens, it can be easily reaffixed with a hot glue gun.
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Record number two from this black/doom/sludge outfit from Salem, Oregon, the second in a proposed trilogy, this one taking the already grim and abject sound of the first installment even further, dragging them even deeper into the infernal pits, the sound hellish and hateful and harrowing, the opening track beginning life as a bleak slab of churning slow motion dirgery, a filthy, crusty tarpit creep, the sound raw and blown out, the guitars tuned WAY down, the vocals a demonic hellish croak, the crushing black doom eventually swallowed up by a cloud of psychedelic guitar swirl, a sort of black metal buzz, but blurred into stasis, before the whole thing collapses into a black hole of crumbling low end and Merzbowic black noise, before briefly returning to the initial doomic plod, before spacing out completely into a hazy stretch of almost Earth like twang, although here it's wreathed in heaving black clouds of buzz, the sound constantly shifting over the course of the rest of the song, from shimmery drift, to wild tangled guitar freakout, to stumbling churn, to blurred drone. And that's just the first track. Although it does lay the groundwork for the rest of the record, the guitars seeming to grow even more blown out, the vocals more and more anguished, the downtuned riffs, even more downtuned, as if the whole thing was melting right there on your turntable. "Metnal" mixes in some actual black metal blasts, as well as some swirling ethereal ambience, "Trucid" too, unfurls some black buzz, strangely twisted and tangled, and in-the-red, so it almost sounds like the tape is malfunctioning, all woozy and warped, before slipping into the prettiest stretch on the album, a lilting clean guitar drift, that leads directly into "Umbilicus", which at nearly 8 minutes is the shortest of the bunch, but which also manages to be the heaviest, the sound so dense and blown out, it pushes the black buzz into the realms of Tim Hecker, the crumbling buzz becoming a wall of roiling texture, the track lurching into a weird convoluted noise rock groove, stonery and sludgey, eventually shedding the sludge, leaving just some muted drumming, and a brittle layer of guitar buzz, that drifts into the weirdly melodic doom-sludge coda. Epic and crushing, brutal and beautiful, we can hardly wait for part three...
LIMITED TO 646 COPIES, pressed on black/oxblood vinyl (hold it up to the light, so cool!), three sided, the fourth featuring a super detailed etching, housed in a thick black and red jacket adorned with super striking woodcuts, inside a 12" x 24" woodcut poster/insert, as well as a digital download coupon.
Latest collection of mysterious musical missives from this modern day musical shaman, Daniel Higgs, he of the late great Lungfish, who transformed that band's penchant for looped cyclical noise rock, into his own brand of haunting hymn-like spiritual ragas. The main instrument here is banjo, but not played like any banjo you've ever heard, plucked and strummed, Higgs coaxing from the instrument a gorgeous array of sounds both melodic and textural, the buzzing notes layered and woven into a droned out buzz, a gorgeously hypnotic Eastern tinged mesmer, laced with mysterious spoken word segments, strange vocalizations. All super low fidelity, the sound constantly shifting, the ker-chunk of the button on the tape machine as much a part of the sound as the jagged primitive edits, and the dreamily lovely melodies, the sound is intimate and urgent, hypnotic and dreamy, there's even some primitive drum machines, which transform the sound, however briefly, into a strange sort of lo-fi krautrock, reminiscent of German Oak's bunker explorations, but way more abstract and psychedelic.
We could go on and on, but by now, most readers of the aQ list are well familiar with Higgs, and won't need much coaxing to grab one of these, especially considering it's LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, which means once these are gone, it's not entirely clear if we'll be able to get more...
Ingenting is Swedish for 'nothing,' and this American collective (half living in California, the other in North Carolina) pays homage to all of the varied meanings that Ingmar Bergman ascribes to the state of 'nothingness.' This certainly entails all of the dark and heavy aspects of Bergman's nihilism and the long pregnant silences that are sporadically interrupted by dialogue; but they also dig into Bergman's films finding poetry in such banal phrases as "I want nothing to eat." Around this conceptual framework, Ingenting Kollektiva recorded their first album in "direct response to music recorded or released in 1969" from which they announce something akin to the Nurse With Wound list, with entries including Holger Czukay, Amon Duul, Ornette Coleman, Pentangle, King Crimson, Alan Silva, etc. None of those artists mentioned seem to offer the construction of Ingenting Kolletiva's darkly kaleidoscopic abstractions and acoustically driven drones; but the ghosts of those sounds certainly haunt the grooves of this record.
The two long-form pieces of Fragments Of Night allude to more contemporary practitioners of the avant-drone, especially Mirror, Thuja, zoviet*france, and Taj Mahal Travellers (to throw things somewhat near the 1969 year-zero mark). The instruments of the collective's choosing include harmonium, cello, guitar, flute, old 78s, psaltry, etc; and the collective deftly obscure those sources through interwoven harmonics, dense layering, and plenty of delay & reverb. The first side opens with gaping, deep thrums of low frequencies that ripples as if dialed into the reflective black ice from some distant moon around Saturn. The plucked notes from the psaltry gracefully pulls back the gloom of that opening passage and sets off a slow-motion dissolve of foghorn bellows, come across somewhere between Deathprod and Caretaker. The flipside is more acoustically sourced, or at least the guitars and horns can be heard amidst the time-delay effects and tape-decay loops, from which melodies form through rasping Tibetan bowls, guitars amass in dense vibrating chunks of space, and a rather dramatic crescendo of agitated violin scrapes builds to a crashing end of tense noise and drone. Limited pressing in a gatefold sleeve, what else could you want from this fantastic record? Oh yeah, there's a download code, too!
We had never heard of Nicolas Jaar before, a well renowned techno producer apparently, but we were immediately blown away by Space Is Only Noise, which seems to be only tangentially 'techno', to our ears it's more a collection of brooding electronic ballads, exploring the world of slo-mo soul already being mined by folks like Burial and How To Dress Well, but In Jaar's hands, that sound becomes something else entirely, just have a listen to the opener "Etre", after a minute or two of lapping waves, and some strange samples, Jaar creates a gorgeous landscape of mournful melody, and strangely clipped and stuttered vocals, the remove most of the sound and render those voices more as rhythm, the combination of the two is so mysterious, and so otherwordly, and when he then introduces the sound of children playing, it ends up being gorgeous and creepy, as the piano grows more dissonant and chaotic. Heck, we would have been happy with a whole record of just that. But there's so much more going on. "Colomb" takes some Pop Ambient swirl and adds a strangely stuttery handclap beat, and some strange autotuned vocals, the resulting croon, both warm and sensual, and strangely alien. Elsewhere, like on "Too Many Kids Finding Rain In The Dust", Jaar channels Gainsbourg, and creates a dark rainy day ballad, that is techno only by merit of the programmed rhythms, "Keep Me There" is another sultry soundscape of skittery beats, liquid samples, dramatic melodies, handclap rhythms, and strange processed vox.
We could go on, track by track, but you should have a measure of what's going on here, and how much we're digging it. A mix of French pop, minimal techno, slo-mo soul, downtempo electronica, with a heaping helping of strange samples, moody warped vocals, lush textures, subtly twisted percussion, and smoldering moodiness to burn, is making this a new favorite for sure. Fans of Blue Daisy, Burial, How To Dress Well, Holy Other, Kode 9, Swarms, Balam Acab, Shlohmo, as well as dark brooding electronic pop music, would do well to check this out!
Much like downtempo & drum n'bass working its way into various forms of pop music in the '90s, the same has been happening with dubstep in the last couple years, popping up on all sorts of mainstream records, most recently by Rihanna and even Britney Spears (keep it like a secret but Andee and Irwin love some of those tracks on the last Britney Spears record!), which have featured awesome moments of full on dubstep fused to their more radio pop dance music sound.
So it makes sense that someone would finally figure out a way to make a record that somehow bridges the gap between a more mainstream RnB/pop aesthetic and dubstep's street roots. Joker seems to understand the exciting possibility of this combination, and he's made a record that merges a more upfront production alongside galactic and bombastic post dubstep grooves. There are songs that sound like Pinch producing tracks by Justin Timberlake and Beyonce, while the instrumentals take on a really cinematic and spaced out vibe. Elsewhere there are more intergalactic moments that sound like Mouse On Mars remixing Boards Of Canada, and some jams that have grime-like outbursts that would be right at home on a Wiley or Dizzee Rascal record, and of course there's some really slick and assured soulful pop.
We're even reminded a bit of The Cinematic Orchestra, not so much sonically, but in how they tap into so many different sounds with a range of vocalists, and then take it those elements in a more exploratory and epic direction.
The Vision is a record that takes a few listens to really sink in, as you allow yourself to open up to a glossier sound then you're probably used to, but from start to finish there are so many interesting and pleasing things going on and actual SONGS that stick!
Hot damn! This is some serious smokin' soul. It's no longer a secret that Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings are THE go-to group for contemporary true sounding soul that does what real soul music is supposed to, make you move and feel!
They've proven it with their three great previous albums, and they've sealed the deal with what is probably one of the best live shows around, and they show no signs of slowing down. Soul Time! is a collection of tracks from various singles, a bunch of unreleased gems, including several songs that anyone who has seen them live will recognize as being show stoppers on stage like "What If We All Stopped Paying Taxes?" There's also a killer cover of the Shuggie Otis classic "Inspiration Information".
We've been blasting this like crazy and falling in love so hard all over again with the grit, chops, and soul that oozes from these songs. The Dap-Kings are without a doubt the tightest band around, and with Sharon Jones running the show with her commanding voice, this collection proves they aren't rehashing, but instead they are keeping the spirit of hard hitting soul alive and kicking. So damn good.
The Old Chamber is the latest from these oddly monikered German post black metallers who have been long time faves, along with the various other bands like Woburn House, Island, and Valborg, who all seem to share members, and definitely share an distinctive aesthetic. The new Woburn House is reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, and while that group seems to be moving further away from metal, Klabautamann seem to be doing precisely the opposite, infusing their sound with a healthy dose of classic old school black metal. Just check out the opener, a pounding melodic blackened dirge, depressive and minor key, but melodic enough that it could be Khold or Katatonia, but then the vocals change everything, a sick, glass gargling raspy black croak, which makes for a strange combo, the music lilting and loping, the vocals venomous and hateful, but it works. Even stranger is when the band's post black metal proclivities shine through, like when the song shifts gears, and gets sort of soaring and proggy, chuggy and mathy, only to slip right back into that melodic lumber, adding some melancholic guitar leads to boot.
The second track "Bog Spawn" finds the sound shifting more toward the sound we remember, a little bit Slinty, but still super heavy, spidery melodies, descending arpeggios, all sort of woozy and sea sick sounding, minus the vocals, it could be some heavy math rock band, the vocals just give it a little bit of black grimnity. On past records, it seemed like the sounds were separate and distinctive, pretty post rocky parts would collide with blasting crusty blackness, and then back again, but it seems like on The Old Chamber, while the overall shift seems to be toward a sound more melodic, it also sounds like those two halves of Klabautamann's sound have been fused into something pretty fantastic. The melodic side definitely seems to hold sway, but it wouldn't sound as good as it does without the grim black energy underneath. Needless to say, this is the sort of avant heaviness and melodic blackness, that we can never get enough of, and while we loved their last record Merkur, we're beginning to think we like this one even more. And along with the Woburn House, we've barely been able to bring ourselves to listen to anything else.
We had never heard of Kohwi before, but heck it's on Black Tent, who has put out records by YouTube electro weirdo Tonetta (his third insane volume of songs reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), a collection of Misfits covers by Slint's Dave Pajo, a killer noise rock split between Orphan and Dope Body, among other weird and wonderful releases, so we wanted to check it out. Plus, it's described as being "best experienced with the aid of head phones and soft drugs", and once we finally got a load of Kohwi, we can't say we could argue with that. A sort of home brewed witch house-y slo-mo soul electronic indie synth pop, a little bit gloomy, a little bit dreamy, the beats skeletal and skittery, the music jangly and shimmery, washed out and woozy, the vocals keening and heatfelt, a collection of strange electro pop ballads, heavy on the effects, and twisted melodies, seemingly pure pop at their core, but dipped in acid and melting before your very ears, everything blurred and smeary and prismatic and technicolor, glitch and stuttery, looped and fractured, with thick almost dubsteppy bass warbles wrapped around deep low end pulses, blasts of clipped white noise, time stretched hooks, all manner of kitchen sink, mad scientist, lo-fi DIY songsmithery, the occasional big bumping beat, the occasional stretch of hazy, rainy day piano, even some dizzying sampledelic blowouts, somehow all woven into a weirdly and just barely cohesive whole, but one that definitely sounds right at home on Black Tent, and should definitely hit the spot for folks who dig home brewed, loopy, druggy, psychedelic outsider electro pop weirdness.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES. Housed in a gorgeous, 3 color hand printed serigraph jacket, and accompanied by a cd (not a cd-r) version of the whole record.
We first experienced the twisted collaged psychedelic whatthefuckness of Koolaid (Global Tyranny) (and yeah, that's their whole name) on the Agitated Records Record Store Day 12", which also featured the Heads, Carlton Melton and Mugstar, and because of the fact that those are three of our favorite groups, we were guessing we'd probably dig Koolaid too, and we did, big time, describing their track as "the weirdest of the bunch, groovy, and almost funky, thick steel string strum, all wreathed in psychedelic guitar noise, laced with some weird samples, drug related of course... all wound into a sound noisy and weirdly tripped out." It was pretty bonkers for sure, but even as nuts as that track was, it barely prepared us for how fucking utterly far out and deliriously drug addled this new full length is.
Four epic tracks, totally drugged out hypnotic space rock of course, but that's just part of the equation, the band set up a groove, usually super simple and minimal, spaced out and krautrocky, and then over the top, they basically let loose, a barrage of samples, all twisted up and layered and doused in effects, some looped rhythmically, others slowed down and sped up, and on top of that sheets of strange drones and whirs, clouds of swooping echo and delay, all manner of backwards melodies, the musical part slipping easily from minimal hushed lope, to pounding wah wah guitar drenched Stooges-y psychedelic stomp, to buzzy raga, to dirgey almost Buttholes Surfer sounding drug rock, but again, it's what's going on all around it, which is like a symphony of malfunctioning samplers gone haywire, the best moments when the band somehow tangle up samples with soaring shredding leads, it's like Negativland meets the Heads, which sounds fucked up, and it is, but in the best possible way. On top of that, the record comes with a bonus cd, which includes the whole record, BUT it's an entirely different mix of the record, apparently at the insistence of the band. Heavy and twisted and psychedelic and dizzyingly out of this world and the musical equivalent to about a hundred hits of acid washed down with a bottle of cough syrup and a handful of thorazine.
It's taken two years, but L'Acephale have finally returned. This Northwestern black metal horde, whose debut was a massive hit around here, after it mysteriously showed up one day, has risen from the murk once again, dragging an army of deacaying flesh with them, hidden from view in the Cascadian forests, the then proceeded to conjure up all manner of sounds and spirits, capturing them only to flay them alive, spread them out beneath a black sun, guts and all, carefully and meticulously crafting the sonic abomination that is this, their second blackened gospel. Another distrubing hybrid of militaristic martial folk, and furious blasting raw blackness, four songs, long songs, the shortest 12 minutes, the longest nearly 25, the opening, a haunting bit of sampled vocals, militaristic percussion, dense drones, haunting chorales, that goes on for nearly six minutes, building the tension, sprawling out like some black military slowly moving machine like toward their next conquest, until finally, the band explode into action, a black cloud of furious buzzing riffage, blasting beats, grunting growling vocals, all wound up into a woozy dizzyingly blasting bit of lurching blackened metal. And then out of nowhere, the buzz and blast drop away, leaving some dark folk, soft strumming, crooned dramatic vocals, moaning violin, the sound definitely reminiscent of Der Blutharsch or Death In June (or perhaps Blood Axis or Waldteufel, seeing as Markus Wolff, one of the drummers, plays in both), gorgeous and languid and darkly haunting, until the rest of the band joins in, splattering the tranquility with chatoc blasts of wild drumming, and more frenetic riffing, finally dropping out, leaving just the sound of wind, and a woman, singing some sort of folks song. Really intense and mysterious. And that's just the first song!
The other three tracks are just as dense and tangled, with sampled soundtracks, to convoluted Deathspell style blackness, laced with haunting acoustic guitars, the band locking into some seriously intense bursts of mathy buzz, languid stretches of string laced dark ambient folk, simple strum, and mournful melodies, soaring epic sounding black doom, majestic and mighty, suoper chaotic black psychedelia whipped into a frenzy and wrapped around a women's chorus, like some fucked up black metal opera, deep lumbering minimal drones, sprawling out endlessly, beneath strange bits of creak and groan, and deep intoned voices, some sort of incantation, creepy bits of piano parlor music, all wrapped up in, and surrounded by, jagged shards of grim frosty blackend buzz.
A seriously twisted and magickal collection of ritualistik black art, a litany of musical blasphemies, as lovely and mysterious as they are hellish and haunting.A black covenent scrawled in flesh and blood, and rendered in pure audial evil.
Incredible packaging, 6 panel digipak, with a massive booklet, which tons of diagrams, photos, lyrics, liner notes, as well as text about the meaning behind each song.
All right. Now this is what I'm talkin' about. 1971, yeah! Andee's always kidding me that I (Allan) think 1971 is the best year for rock music ever. That's not true of course ('69 and '70 and '72 were no slouches either!), but I do rate it pretty highly. There were SO MANY great records that year, among them Tago Mago, First Utterance, Nursery Cryme, Music To Eat, Satori, Master Of Reality, Funkadelic, Neu! 1, Culpeper's Orchard, Demon And Eleven Children, Love It To Death, In Search Of Space, Stormcock...ohmigod...there's so many. I don't know how I would have survived if I was of a music-buying age in 1971. But I was only two years old. It's sure would have been tough to make a top ten list if I was working at Aquarius back then!! But I'm pretty sure that this Life album (if I even woulda known about it, I wonder if Aquarius ever stocked the original import LP?) would have made that list. Seriously.
Of course, even if folks back then probably didn't appreciate it (foolishly thinking that rock was in some sorta prog-clogged doldrums) they were living in some special times. Especially special if you like the hard/heavy/acid rock like I do.
Ok, more about Life then: they were a skilled Swedish psych-prog trio that spun songs that incorporate (sometimes in the same composition) two quite different but equally excellent extremes -- they do some light n' lush, very pretty pop with piano and full orchestration. But then there's also a lotta rib-rattling dirge-rock with glacial, gargantuan guitars! The combination is epic and elegant, and puts 'em (in my book) almost in the same league as Queen and Deep Purple and Uriah Heep! A quick n' dirty description might be Cream-meets-Queen. And this was before Queen ever released an album. For '71, the heaviness is right up there. Killer songs, stellar vocals, a definite stoner spirit. I can't imagine any of AQ's customers who are real '70s proto-metal freaks not digging this album, even if you don't normally get into the poppier stuff...just 'cause its SO GOOD. And the lighter fare is integral even to the slabs of heaviosity for which you're really gonna worship this album. Yeah, it's heavy, and even when not, it's damn bombastic. In a way that makes even the tracks that are the most doomy and downer definitely also have a lively, uplifting vibe. I'm telling you, if Life were British and had made more than one album (instead of breaking up 'cause of joining the cast of the Swedish touring production of Hair!), you'd know about 'em already. I mean, they'd be '70s classic rock royalty for sure, at least as famous as, I dunno, Nazareth.
Getting back to the whole 1971 thing: in actuality, this album was originally released in 1970 with Swedish lyrics, then released with English language vocals in '71, and that version is the only one to be reissued on cd. Normally I prefer bands to sing in their native tongue, but this guy is a such a good singer, and avoids any embarrasing accent-issues, and the lyrics are pretty cool ("Once I saw a castle / made by rocks and sand / I used to touch that castle / with my magic hand"). A couple of the bonus tracks are in Swedish, too (where they suddenly sound like Dungen gone arena!).
Now I don't want to freak out and make like this is the best record EVER or anything, but it's really really good and is something that should be much better known that's for sure. So we've ordered a few to try and spread the word...
It's been a few years since we've had a proper solo outing from Lindstrom. While he's kept busy collaborating with folks like Prins Thomas, and Christabelle, we've been anxious to see what his new batch of songs would sound like. And we have to say we were psyched to discover him pushing his sound into some exciting new directions. While he was at the forefront of the whole 'beardo-disco' revival a few years back, it's refreshing to see that he isn't just making the same record over and over. In fact Six Cups Of Rebel is by far his most varied, ambitious, eclectic, and unique recording to date. We're reminded of a remix that Eye from The Boredoms did for Lindstrom a few years back and how possibly that may have informed some of the aesthetic of this album, as there is a newfound hyper-galactic-electro-prog sound going on in Six Cups Of Rebel that we are digging tons.
While it seems like all his colleagues have been studying up on the sound of classic Goblin recordings, we think Lindstrom may have also been digging deep into the world of Magma. It's the first Lindstrom record where it feels like he's finally let loose, ending up crafting a more fractured cosmic sound, reminding us of all those early Warp records by folks like Plaid, Mira Calix, LFO, Aphex Twin, etc. And then a track like "De Javu" which sounds like David Byrne, Holger Czukay, and 808 State jamming on an extended B-side of some white label 12".
Lindstrom mastered the space disco sound and it would have been so easy for him to make a really pleasing but static sounding cosmic disco record again, but instead he's pushing himself as an artist and taking risks that we think are pretty exciting.
On the most recent Pop Ambient collection, we singled out the track by Loops Of Your Heart as one of the standouts, not even realizing then that LOYH was in fact an alter ego of aQ fave The Field, but once we discovered that, it made perfect sense. That track rife with the same sort of wistful emotion, and melodic sensibility that made us love The Field so much in the first place. The big difference seemingly less of a reliance on loops. Even with the loop-centric name. Where as The Field offered up dizzying collages of densely layered melodies and textures, that somehow become so much more that its constituent parts, Loops seems to be focused on a sound that's more organic, even a little bit more poppy, the sort of thing you might expect to hear on Morr music, a new strain of indie electronica, the sort of twee pop sensibilities applied to beats and yeah, loops, all woven into warm, melodic grooves, and cool synthy sci-fi atmospheres. Opener "Little You, You Should Develop" lays down a throbbing synth bass, beneath swirls of ethereal melody and wisps of glitch and crackle, before slipping into the 10+ minute "Broken Bow", which is downright dark in comparison, beginning with a strange detuned doomy sounding drift, again rife with synth swirls, and woozy shimmer, the main melodic component a strange disembodied guitar chord, wreathed in effects, which does in fact make this, at least briefly, sound like some weird electro-doom. Soon that slo-mo creep is joined by pulsing synths, reminiscent of Zombi or Majeure, that sort of retro-futuristic soundtrack sound, but it's not until halfway through that the doomy element fades away, leaving something more melodic, and darkly (and dreamily) driving, the sound transformed into a sort of late night, autobahn style driving music. From there on out, the record continues to meld a subtly darker soundtracky element, to swooshes of synth squelch, cool layered electronics, warm echo drenched sun dappled drift, hazy, seventies soundtrack sounding atmospheres, bouncy minimal synth grooves, and washed out celestial filmstrip future wave that sounds like something James Ferraro would flip over. Our favorite track though might have to be the record's centerpiece, the 11 minute "Cries", a sprawling bit of Pop Ambient style atmospherics, laced with all manner of dark energy, abstract percussion, slow shifting textures, deep low end melodies, tranquil and meditative, but also super cosmic and dreamlike, and another one of those songs that could have filled up the whole record and we would have been plenty happy.
The Omni Recording Corporation has been killing it lately in a string of essential vinyl reissue collaborations with the Australian Roundtable label, focusing on rare library, lounge and private press exotica. We recently listed the Orchestra Peter Thomas Orion 2000 lp of tripped out sci-fi grooves, and this week we have two extremely fine examples of Italian library music from composer Egisto Macchi and his more well known group that included Ennio Morricone, Gruppo D'Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza.
I Futuribili (The Futuristic) was recorded in 1972 for the Gemelli Library and is one of that label's rarest releases. Along with the ritualistic Voix, this is also one of the composer's most essential. Marked by a spacious sound environment and high-relief recording techniques, Macchi takes the listener on a surreal trip of suspenseful strings, big metallic washes, tinkling bells and plaintive electroacoustic atmospherics. Mysterious, and alluring but not necessarily foreboding, these pieces could easily be the soundtrack for a horror or sci-fi film or even a planetary documentary. But what's most interesting about library music composition as opposed to composing a soundtrack is that soundtrack composers compose to the visuals of a director, while in library music, it's the other way around. We're drawn into visualizing the music and creating a larger storyline through the sound design. And while this may sound cold or abstract on paper, Macchi instills a lot of warmth, depth and beauty into these pieces that envelops us in an exquisite sound world, unlike any we've heard in British library music such as DeWolfe or KPM.
Limited to 500 copies, these might be the last we get, so don't snooze!
Yet another full length from the crazy prolific Tim Cohen, mastermind of SF jangle poppers The Fresh & Onlys as well as the man behind weird one man black metal band Amocoma (released on Andee's tUMULt label), who was STILL not busy enough so started a 'solo' project, which was in fact a band called Tim Cohen's Magic Trick, but for this new album, a couple things have changed, now it's a proper band, right down to the name, and instead of perfect little 2 and 3 minute pop nuggets, this record is four long songs, the sounds shifting and sprawling, Cohen and company stretching out a bit, keeping much of the pop intact, but weaving it into much more expansive and experimental frameworks. This permutation of Magic Trick includes members of Thee Oh Sees, the Sandwitches and Citay, and Cohen and his cohorts unfurl some gorgeously lush folk, all glimmering melodies, hushed vox, strummed acoustic guitars, ethereal harmonies, the sound beholden to classic sixties psych pop for sure, but reimagined and filtered through Cohen's twisted pop lens, the opener jangly and dreamy, a seriously epic pop song, almost prog pop, and then about 10 minutes in the song shifts dramatically, and is transformed into a buzzing drone-y raga, hazy and psychedelic and darkly dreamy. And from there on out, the record continues on in a similar fashion, not shying away from abrupt shifts, or melding disparate sounds, "Daylight Moon" takes a strummy shuffle, and adds all sorts of progginess, some cool start stop arrangements, some jazzy psychedelic freakouts, but all wound around a delicate pop core.
"Clyde" starts out all hushed and strummy, rife with woodwinds, lush vocal harmonies, infused with a dreamy droniness, the song subtly propulsive but growing less so as the song progresses, evolving into a sort of shimmery drift, before the strangely jaunty almost cabaret sounding coda. And finally, "High Heat" begins with some Fahey style American primitive guitar, draped over a buzzing thrum, before slipping into a reverbed skeletal folk, the sound blossoming into something much more lush, almost like some sort of chamber pop, and then again, the song shifts into a dark drum heavy psych folk, almost dirgey, but still impossibly poppy, and laced with vocal ooh's and aah's and swoonsome soaring strings, Cohen and his crew managing what in most hands would be impossible, creating catchy, perfect pop that just so happens to be in the form of 10+ minute long epics. Almost makes us hope he never goes back to the 3 minute pop song...
You may have seen the oddly named SF garage psych trio The Mallard opening for folks like Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees, Blasted Canyons, thus it makes sense that they would end up on John Dwyer of the Oh Sees' Castle Face label, and once you get an earful off their twisted lo-fi FX drenched garage pop wooze, we imagine you'll be pretty smitten. Unlike many of the other female fronted garage rock combos, The Mallard don't get all warm and shimmery sixties girl group, instead they traffic in something much more off kilter and tweaked, sorta like Syd Barrett if he were a woman, fronting some twisted drug addled art rock combo, but here filtered through the occasional classic garage rock trope, although for every bit of poppy jangle or sweet harmony, there's a cracked bit of detuned stumble, or a bizarre stretch with droned out chords and strange alien vocal yips, and did we mention effects, at times it's like they stomped on a pedal and forgot all about it, until eventually and usually unexpectedly, the sound will shift and suddenly it's all low slug slithery groove, or dirgey gloom pop bounce, and the production too, just as fucked up, with various instruments and vocal parts exploding into shards of buzzing crunch, stretched out into blurry drones, pushed so loud it sounds like the speakers might blow, but somehow, even at its most demented and deliriously twisted, the songs, especially on repeated listens, blossom into some of the most imperfectly perfect pop we've heard in ages. And weirdly enough (or maybe not), fans of Thee Oh Sees with find that of all the groups out there doing this sort of thing, The Mallard's sound / style / songs might just come closest to the OCS mothership, which is absolutely not a bad thing.
Killer bear-barfing-blood cover art. Includes a download coupon so you can listen to these jamz on your computer.
If we had to pick a favorite rock voice Mark Lanegan would definitely be way at the top of the list. Even back in the days of his first band The Screaming Trees, Lanegan's voice was the first thing anybody noticed, deep and raspy, smokey and whisky soaked, and over the years, if anything it's only gotten better. And barring the occasional misstep, we have to say we can't think of a Lanegan record we didn't dig. What we can say, is we can't remember one we dug nearly as much as Blues Funeral, which is exactly the sort of title you'd expect from Lanegan, and sonically, you might not be surprised if once you pushed play, a dark brooding blues creep oozed out of the speaker, but what WILL surprise you is opener "The Gravedigger's Song", which explodes out of the gate with dense tribal drumming, thick fuzzed out bass, pulsing synths, bursts of white noise crunch, and those vocals, it's the heaviest and darkest we've heard Lanegan in years, psychedelic, strangely poppy, a little bit new wavey, but holy shit. The rest of the record flits all over, from sound to sound, the new group not shying way from anything, whether it's drum machines (especially drum machines!), synths, jangly pop, whatever, the deft songwriting, Lanegan's voice, and a dark sonic streak holds all the disparate parts together, just check out "Ode To Sad Disco" which somehow sounds like Depeche Mode crossed with Justice, all dark electro synth pop, but still impossibly moody and brooding, but weirdly enough, it's that seemingly out of place synth pop element and the drum machines that really make this record so cool and weird and special, and definitely makes it one of our favorite Lanegan records yet.
Originally released way back in 2004, now reissued on vinyl!
Mr. Lanegan sure invited all his buddies to be in his Mark Lanegan Band. Just check this roster out: Joshua Homme and Nick Oliveri (Queen Of The Stone Age), PJ Harvey, Izzy Stradlin and Duff McKagan (Guns'n Roses/Velvet Revolver), Greg Dulli (Afghan Whigs and Twilight Singers), Dean Ween and Chris Goss (Masters Of Reality)! Pretty hot shit! And whether rocked up (as on the album's first single "Sideways In Reverse") or slow'n'smoldering (check out "Wedding Dress"), the overall results are absolutely smokin'. The only wrinkles in the album are minor ones. First, Harvey's vocal performance on the second song "Hit The City" seems oddly detached, almost as if her backing vocals were an afterthought with her singing along over a finished recording. Their duet on "Come To Me" fares much much better. More troublesome are the occasional way-out-of-place soul diva background vocals that also marred earlier Twilight Singers records, and seem like some weird requisite big budget addition when an artist makes the shift from hyped indie veteran to hyped major label hopeful. That said, Bubblegum reveals Lanegan's broadest scope to date, incorporating elements from all the stages of his lengthy career (early trippy grunge-y rock to funereal dirge-twang). Throughout the fifteen songs, his unmistakable deep smoky rasp of a voice is in particular top form. Awesome!
Damn, the metalheads here are geeking out over this gem! As super obscure cult '80s metal bands go, Max Planck from up in the boonies of Port Townsend, WA, are definitely one of our faves. A few years back, Buried By Time And Dust did a pricey vinyl reissue, now out of print, of this bizarro band's 1985 demo, that we never managed to review, so we're stoked that Stormspell has just done a nice new, less expensive (but still limited) compact disc version, complete with bonus track.
Of all the demos that could be rescued from the dusty past, this one is so very worthy. Max Planck were a three-piece playing a charming homebrewed brand of DIY metal, putting on their own shows out in the woods, though they also played clubs in Seattle too. Epic and melodic, rockin' and catchy, eccentric and sorta psychedelic, this should definitely appeal to those into the marginally less obscure likes of Manilla Road, Cirith Ungol, Brocas Helm, Black Hole, and even Dwarr and Zolar X.
We were surprised to learn that the guitarist and bassist were husband and wife, with kids!! That'd be Rod Freeman, also the vocalist, and Colleen "Spike" McCormick. The trio was rounded out by 15 year old drummer Eddie Forcier.
Proggy and punky at the same time, their song titles include "Fucked Up" and "Everywhere Is Nowhere", but they weren't really such a negative, nihilistic bunch. The song "Starscream" is in fact about the Transformers cartoon, a sci-fi subject that makes a lot of sense considering that Spike and Rod were raising two small children and Eddie was basically still a kid himself.
Weird and nerdy as their metal is, it makes sense that they'd be named after a famous German physicist, the founder of quantum theory - but, the name of the band was in fact selected through a chance operation that also involved the help of a mystical forest druid. Read the liner notes.... (And also be aware that though we're not reproducing it due to the limitations of our website's coding, the band's official spelling of their name of course includes a very metal umlaut over the "a" in Planck.)
Max Planck's namesake scientist won a Nobel Prize in 1918, and if they gave out an award for quirky, inspired, old school metal-making, Max Planck the band would be a deserving recipient.
Limited edition, hand-numbered, 500 copies only. The cd booklet includes biographical liner notes, full lyrics, gear specs, vintage b&w photos, and graphics from their rare vinyl appearances (on the Metal Meltdown lp compilation, and on a split 7").
Definitely an auspicious start for Stormspell's new "arcane collector series" of obscure '80s metal demo reissues, look for other volumes by Aerian Rage and Battlecry to be reviewed here soon...
And, as they liked to say, it's now time to CRANK THE PLANCK!!!!
It's hard to argue with a mysterious ritualistic ambient doom outfit from France, especially, when there are six members, four of whom are credited with 'low frequencies', while the other two are credited with 'deep pulses', and then on top of that, spread out between all six: ultrasounds, 'ondulations', horns, bowls, incantations, screams, organum, bells, bowls and 'arpegiatas'. As well as the fact that they are each credited with the honorific 'frater' before their names, casting Mhonos less as a musical group and more as some sort of arcane religious sect, formed around a slavish devotion to the drone, specifically a blackened strain of doom-ed drone, cobbled together from multiple, thick, layered, downtuned bass dirges, minimal percussion, looped rumbles and chanted vox, creating a seriously liturgical, choral vibe, the first twenty three minutes of the opening thirty four minute track, a totally mesmerizing, lurching, lumbering and looped creep, a hybrid of SUNNO)))-like slo-mo-dirgery, and the vocal driven low end ritualism of recent aQ faves Phurpa, all tethered to a ritualistic death march rhythm, and we're talking total blissed out atmospheric ambient doooooooom, which eventually transforms, albeit briefly, into a couple measure of more traditionally metallic heaviness, as if the song was finally going to launch into some serious riffery, only to almost immediately zone out into some spacey longform layered drone/drift shimmer, the tones descending, the chordal whir seeming to detune, as various low end tendrils begin to swoop and sway, the drums returning, but more as filigree than propulsion, before finishing off with a surprising squall of chaotic psychedelia.
Which leads directly into the shorter (relatively, at 8 minutes) second track, which right out of the gate sounds like Tuvan throat singers teamed up with Skepticism, a whirring organ like blur, stretches out like a grim black haze, the drums a primitive pound, the vocals deep raspy rumbles, somewhere between throat singing and death metal gurgle, the sound dark and dense and ominous, but also strangely meditative and mesmerizing, this song too gradually blossoming into something strangely warm, and again abstractly psychedelic.
The record finishes with a nearly 35 minute long sonic bookend, starting out with some serious distorted metallic bass riffing, which again hints at an eventual explosion into some sort of black blast or furious pounding blowout, but instead, the sound lurches into a crushing slab of tribal drum driven slowcore pummel, dizzying and almost industrial, the sound fracturing into a grinding blackened almost-noise rock, the multiple basses providing both heft and melody, the vocals here transformed into more of a punk rock yowl, the whole sound heaving and roiling malevolently, before suddenly and surprisingly evolving into a strange sort of tripped out psych drone drift, all effected bass melodies and swirling FX, hazy and heady, washed out and woozy. Eventually, the basses swell and the heaviness returns, and the song becomes a depressive blackdoom creep, with slow motion riffs, and more demonic drum pound, everything blown out and super distorted, sounding a bit like Cop Shoot Cop or Swans at 16rpm, heaving and heavy, the various low end buzzed and drones peeling way one by one until just strangled mewling vocal, and a pounding echo drenched drum remain, a haunting and harrowing finish for sure.
So great. Most definitely for fans of SUNNO))) and other likeminded purveyors of low slung slo-mo heaviness, as well as anyone into mysterious vocal driven ritualism, a la Phurpa, Huun-Huur-Tu, etc, and generally all and any manner of funeral doom metal, droned out black ambience and atmospheric bass driven tarpit creep...
Years and years and years ago (2001!), we reviewed a record by a Canadian seventies worshipping hard rock combo with the bizarre name of Sir Hedgehog, and it was one of those classic records pretty much all the aQ heavy rockers here were obsessed with, we sold a ton too, and always sort of wondered what happened to those guys. Well, apparently at least some of them now play in another goofily monikered outfit, this one called Monobrow, and while they may not worship the seventies as much as they once did, they're still heavy and hard rocking and psychedelic, the new band is all instrumental though, with a more stoner metal vibe, big riffs, killer leads, bombastic drumming, the songs mathy and a little bit proggy, we even hear a little Fucking Champs, if the Champs were on MeteorCity. And actually, the deeper we get into the record, maybe these guys haven't ditched that seventies love as much as we thought, plenty of proto-metal sounding grooving, wild wah wah guitar freakouts, thick meandering melodic basslines, and songs that are pretty goddamn catchy considering they're instrumental, as well as pretty dense and proggy, but hell, we can't imagine anyone into heavy psych, stoner metal, riff rock or just classic heaviness, not flipping out over these guys.
Most definitely recommended, and another one of those records we can't seem to stop listening to.
Not sure what else to say about these two guys that we haven't already. Together in the group Zombi, and on their own, they are the modern masters of the not so modern art of John Carpenter / Goblin style psychedelic space synth futuristic-retro faux soundtrackery, and here both get to share a record and do what they do best. Moore offers up 4 tracks of THAT sound, one we can't seem to get enough of, and apparently neither can most of you: swirling sci-fi synths, pulsing rhythms, tense and cinematic, the occasional stretch of swooshy new age shimmer, but heavy on the eighties soundtrack vibe, and rife with some darkly dirgey drama, a mini-song cycle that definitely works as a whole.
Which perfectly counters Majeure, who takes up the whole B side with a three part 20+ minute epic, ditching much of the synth-disco-kraut sound that so defined previous outings, or at least the disco part of the equation, instead building a hushed and ominous dronescape, super minimal, very soundtracky, the second movement finds the sound blossoming into something more Tangerine Dreamy, cosmic and psychedelic, before eventually, for the last few minutes, returning to a sort progged out kraut-disco coda to finish things off!
Killer psychedelic sand-hand cover art. Include a download coupon as well!
We might as well just start out with the obvious. Pop record of the year. Hands down. We knew it would be. And yeah, even in January, it's pretty much already been decided. In fact the minute we found out there was a new Nada Surf record on the horizon, we began to count the days, and wonder if it would be one of those slow growers, or if we'd be immediately obsessed (it was the latter, btw). And really, one of the only reasons it's not Record Of The Week, is because it just so happened to come out when we already had an embarrassment of ROTW's picked, but rest assured, for some of us, this is most definitely Record Of The Week, and most likely record of the year too.
Most people are probably super excited to extol the virtues of their favorite band, or that record they've been anxiously awaiting, and we are too obviously, but for us it comes with the added pressure of 'what the hell do we say about this', especially when it's a band whose records we've gushed about extensively in the past, two of those records past Records Of The Week in fact, we've said it before, but this is one of those records where we just want the whole review to be "Just buy it! it's so great! We love it and can't stop listening to it! We've been driving the not-so-pop-obsessed around here CRAZY with repeated listens, sometimes just setting the cd player on repeat!" And heck, for some of you that will be enough, if you dug the last few Nada Surf records, which loads of you did, you'll love this one too. We want to say it's the best one yet, but we say that every time. We can say, it's maybe the most rocking one yet. With a lot few slower songs, and some of their heaviest tunes, but without sacrificing any of the lush hookiness or irresistible jangle. We'd say just listen to the samples, cuz we really can't imagine anyone being able to resist, but on the off chance that you do need more...
Nada Surf have moved well beyond potential one hit wonder status, after the ubiquitous MTV airplay of a certain song called "Popular" back in the nineties (YouTube it), and ever since, they've continued to hone a sound rooted in classic power pop and nineties indie rock, a sound that quickly became all their own, lush and melodic and jangly, with Matthew Caws' super distinctive vox, and a melodic flair and impeccable songwriting that eventually became just as distinctive, their lyrics clever and smart, literate and carefully constructed, harmonies lush and lovely, songs that rock as much as they drift and shimmer, every record packed with potential hits, not a bit of filler, and this new one is no different. Opener "Clear Eye, Clouded Mind" starts things off with a bang, thick crunchy guitars, big pounding drums, and some impossibly catchy melodies, and like many of their tracks, the verse and bridge are just as catchy as the chorus, if not more so. "Waiting For Something" is another killer, all chiming and sunshiney, crunchy and fuzzy, big guitars, and even bigger vocals, all woven into a super dynamic arrangement that manages to be both intricate and hooky as hell. "When I Was Young" starts off all folky and balladic, just steel string guitar and gorgeous vox, eventually blossoming into a big crunchy jangly second half, "Jules And Jim" is another great one, the band taking unlikely melodies and complex arrangements and impossibly transforming them into pure perfect pop. We could go song by song, cuz every song here KILLS, everyone with a chorus most other bands would kill for, and most likely a verse that other bands would make into a chorus, but odds are we'd just end up repeating ourselves. But we can say, which we've mentioned before, is that as much as we obsess over grim black metal and noisy chaotic heaviness and weird dronemusic and all that sort of far out freaky stuff, we find ourselves always coming back to this, and NOT just because it's poppy and catchy, but because it's poppy and catchy in a way that so much other 'catchy pop' is NOT. Sure these guys are a pop band, but what they do with that pop is utterly magical.
It's at this point that we DO say, just listen to the sound samples, this is the sort of visceral emotional music that will connect right away, and if you're anything like us, once you hear it, you won't want to stop hearing it, and you'll want to hear more and more!
While they last, the first handful of copies will come bundled with a bonus disc of studio recorded acoustic versions of some of the tracks from the new record!
A furious blast of frenzied venomous pounding punk rock fury, nine songs, eleven minutes, these Tampa, Florida punks kick out the trebly lo-fi jams, seriously raw hardcore rife with corrosive blown out guitars, throat shredding vox, pounding chaotic drumming, short sharp bursts of caustic hateful sonic crush wreathed in plenty of amp buzz and tape hiss, think Siege, Crossed Out, SSD, Drop Dead and the like. Some hidden hooks and some hints of gloom, but for the most part this is just a fierce chunk of angry, pissed off, punk rock, fuck off energy that KILLS. Gorgeous packaging too. Punk rock record of the year (well last year anyway) hands down!
